Customer Rating: 4.43 of 5 (7 total reviews)

A superbly accessible and useful primer

The collaboration of XDoclet seasoned experts and enthusiasts Craig Walls and Norman Richards, XDoclet In Action is a truly user-friendly introduction and guide to the metadata-driven, code generation engine for Java called XDoclet, and its many uses. A wealth of instructions, examples, and sample code lay out how XDoclet can be used with EJBs, Servlets, JMX, and other technologies, as well as customized or out-of-the-box uses to which XDoclet can be put for one's specific needs. A superbly accessible and useful primer, reference, and self-teaching tool, XDoclet In Action is a welcome addition to the computer reference shelf.

A Good Start, But Lacks Depth

I bought this book on the strength of the Amazon reccomendations.

If you don't know anything about XDoclet, or you don't like working from the online documentation, then you need this book. But if your a real world working developer who is hoping for a quick, detailed jumpstart then you will be disappointed.

I feel the book starts well, but quickly becomes superficial and only addresses easy topics. For illustration, consider that entity bean relationships get less than two pages and a weak example. In comparison, "Enterprise Java Beans" by Monson-Haefel devotes a whole chapter to entity bean relationships.

I feel this book would be much improved if the Blog example was more fully developed and the source was available (as O'Reilly does).

As it stands, I'm still poking through the sample code provided w/XDoclet and creating small test applications to see what is generated. Too bad the book didn't answer my questions and save me some time.

Answer to all our prayers

It is a really good book for those who want to learn and work with Xdoclet. I am work for a sofware compay and part of my job is to learn new softwares and put them in to implimentation. Before I got this book, I have read all possible online documentation there is but, none came close to Xdoclet in action.

The book is well laid out and the examples are self explanatory.

It describes all posible scenarioes that a person can think of and is explained excellent.